5 ms·

they tried this (!?) a decade ago too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

wmf 6y ago
As meh as Xe is, it's a working GPU which is dramatically more mature than Larrabee ever was.
wtallis 6y ago
Larrabee was a weird attempt to force x86 into the GPU space. It was more hubris than silicon. Xe is Intel actually making a serious attempt to build decent discrete GPUs, without bizarre political constraints on the technological designs the team can pursue.
- skissane 6y ago
  I view it as an attempt to explore the question "can a competitive GPU architecture be built as an extension of a mainstream CPU architecture?". And they tried it and it didn't work out, which suggests the answer is "No". But I don't fault them for trying – a willingness to try out different areas of the design space, even test them in the market, is a positive thing. Of course, you can see why a vendor whose major product is a mainstream CPU architecture might have a special interest in exploring that particular design question, but it still was a valid question to explore, even if they didn't get the result they were hoping for. We can learn as much from failures as from successes.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    I think it was really obvious up front that Larrabee wasn't going to have enough graphics-specific hardware on the chip for it to have a chance at being a competitive GPU for consumer gaming. At best, they were aiming for a heavily compute-oriented chip that could also do graphics, but for graphics tasks it was going to be heavily reliant on brute forcing the problem with a large, expensive chip. So a bit further toward the compute-oriented end of the spectrum than any of the GPU microarchitectures than any of the GPUs AMD or NVIDIA have shipped. And it ended up that it was only viable for compute tasks if they stripped out the rest of the graphics hardware, and x86 compatibility wasn't enough to overcome NVIDIA's lead in GPGPU software support. If Intel could have brought Larrabee to market with fabrication two nodes ahead of NVIDIA/AMD, it probably could have been successful. But Intel has a pretty solid track record of being unable to maintain two competitive microarchitectures at the same time, and I don't think they've ever quite been two full nodes ahead.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  IIRC Larrabee actually worked but it failed largely due to internal politics, not because of technical issues.
AceJohnny2 6y ago
It's funny to consider RISC-V in the light of Larrabee. RISC-V was conceived as a multi-purpose extensible ISA to unify the toolspace for MCUs, DSPs, CPUs, GPUs, etc. Larrabee wanted to leverage the toolspace of the x86 ISA, but that same ISA complicated their architecture and made it nonviable.
jcranmer 6y ago
Larrabee kind of lived on in the Xeon Phi line, although the Xeon Phis were purely targeted at compute with no graphics capability like Larrabee was. Intel Xe is closer to taking the existing integrated GPUs and sticking them on a discrete card instead of the same socket as the main CPU.
mrec 6y ago
And the i740 two decades ago. Intel does not have a great track record with graphics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740

wmf 6y ago

As meh as Xe is, it's a working GPU which is dramatically more mature than Larrabee ever was.

wtallis 6y ago

Larrabee was a weird attempt to force x86 into the GPU space. It was more hubris than silicon. Xe is Intel actually making a serious attempt to build decent discrete GPUs, without bizarre political constraints on the technological designs the team can pursue.

skissane 6y ago
I view it as an attempt to explore the question "can a competitive GPU architecture be built as an extension of a mainstream CPU architecture?". And they tried it and it didn't work out, which suggests the answer is "No". But I don't fault them for trying – a willingness to try out different areas of the design space, even test them in the market, is a positive thing. Of course, you can see why a vendor whose major product is a mainstream CPU architecture might have a special interest in exploring that particular design question, but it still was a valid question to explore, even if they didn't get the result they were hoping for. We can learn as much from failures as from successes.
- wtallis 6y ago
  I think it was really obvious up front that Larrabee wasn't going to have enough graphics-specific hardware on the chip for it to have a chance at being a competitive GPU for consumer gaming. At best, they were aiming for a heavily compute-oriented chip that could also do graphics, but for graphics tasks it was going to be heavily reliant on brute forcing the problem with a large, expensive chip. So a bit further toward the compute-oriented end of the spectrum than any of the GPU microarchitectures than any of the GPUs AMD or NVIDIA have shipped. And it ended up that it was only viable for compute tasks if they stripped out the rest of the graphics hardware, and x86 compatibility wasn't enough to overcome NVIDIA's lead in GPGPU software support. If Intel could have brought Larrabee to market with fabrication two nodes ahead of NVIDIA/AMD, it probably could have been successful. But Intel has a pretty solid track record of being unable to maintain two competitive microarchitectures at the same time, and I don't think they've ever quite been two full nodes ahead.
badsectoracula 6y ago
IIRC Larrabee actually worked but it failed largely due to internal politics, not because of technical issues.

AceJohnny2 6y ago

It's funny to consider RISC-V in the light of Larrabee. RISC-V was conceived as a multi-purpose extensible ISA to unify the toolspace for MCUs, DSPs, CPUs, GPUs, etc. Larrabee wanted to leverage the toolspace of the x86 ISA, but that same ISA complicated their architecture and made it nonviable.

jcranmer 6y ago

Larrabee kind of lived on in the Xeon Phi line, although the Xeon Phis were purely targeted at compute with no graphics capability like Larrabee was. Intel Xe is closer to taking the existing integrated GPUs and sticking them on a discrete card instead of the same socket as the main CPU.

mrec 6y ago

And the i740 two decades ago. Intel does not have a great track record with graphics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740